It is difficult for Jessica Hepburn to pinpoint the exact moment she decided to climb to the top of the world, as well as listen to every available episode of. Desert Island Discs.
“They became so inextricably linked in my mind,” says the author, adventurer and self-described “unlikely athlete” who successfully climbed Mount Everest in 2022, at the age of 51.
Previous achievements include swimming the English Channel and running the London Marathon. Desert Island Discs was her joy, her pleasure, her fuel. “I’m artistic, not sporty. There is nothing I enjoy about swimming, running or mountain climbing except that it gives me a license to eat and drink on the couch,” she says.
First broadcast in 1942, there are over 3,300 episodes of the classic BBC radio show available online. Since Hepburn began her training to climb 8,848 meters to the top of the world’s highest mountain in 2017, she has listened to each one – often while training hills with weighted packs on her back. The realization that she could combine hard physical exercise with her passion and, better yet, that her favorite radio show would make it easier, was a “life-changing moment”, says Hepburn.
Interviewees on the show are famously asked for the eight tracks, a book and a luxury item they would take with them if they were cast away on a desert island, explaining their choices, before choosing just one track they of the waves would save. “The music unlocks stories and truths from its renegades who are, let’s face it, the Who’s Who of British life over the last 100 years,” says Hepburn. “Each pitcher has offered me so much wisdom and learning.”
In her memoirs, Save Me From The Waves, Hepburn recounts how, while training for Everest, she is at one point the only person in her group who fails to climb Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe, from the north side. She lay in her sleeping bag, exhausted but too upset to sleep, listening to the actor Tim Robbins tells Kirsty Young that at 50 he began to think: “How many years do I have left? And in those moments you go: what the hell am I doing here?” He continued: “I asked myself the question: what is it that will make you happy? What is it that you didn’t do that you will regret?”
The next morning she got up, walked down to base camp and drove around to the south side (which, being slightly warmer, is slightly easier to climb). From there she successfully climbed to “the top of Europe”. And when she got there, she cried. “But they were happy tears. Tears of self-love.”
In 2021, due to Covid, cyclones and a chest infection, she failed in her second attempt to climb Everest (her first attempt, in 2020, was also thwarted by the pandemic). But it was discarded with the author Paulo Coelho which convinced her to try again the following year. “From the moment you have dreams,” he said in his Desert Island Discs interview, “at least you can start fighting for your dreams. And from the moment you fight for your dream, everything makes sense.”
“That’s when I realized that the beauty of life is to have dreams,” Hepburn says. “Hardness comes when you don’t know what you want from life.”
The twist here is that Hepburn knew what she wanted, and couldn’t get it, no matter how hard she tried to make her dream a reality. Diagnosed with unexplained infertility in her 30s, she spent a decade – and more than £70,000 – trying to become a mother, undergoing 11 unsuccessful rounds of IVF, multiple miscarriages and a near-fatal ectopic pregnancy. Then, when she was in her mid-40s – after repeatedly finding out she wasn’t pregnant for years, including the day her father died – her 16-year relationship with Peter, her “total soulmate” and the love of her life, broke. “Everything we went through was a factor,” Hepburn says. “It became abundantly clear that our relationship was irreparable.” The couple sold their house and separated, and Hepburn moved back alone to her childhood home in North London. “If there was an Olympics for mental endurance, I think I’d be on the podium,” she says. “This is my power.”
With a “huge emotional hole” in her life where her family should have been, she hiked up Ben Nevis and Snowdonia, hit the hills of the Lake District and the Peak District and traversed the entirety of Parliament Hill, constantly missing the absence of Molly felt. , her name for the unborn child who had lived only in her imagination.
Often, when she was training in the mountains, she would meet younger, fitter climbers – usually men – who would ask her why she was there. “I’m just a middle-aged woman with a dream,” she used to say. But sometimes she told them the cold, hard, unpleasant truth: that it was because she was in “a lot of pain”. “I was in so much pain, emotionally,” she writes in her memoir. “The challenges gave me something else to focus on and the physical hardship released the pain in a way that I think improved my life.” While training for her first Everest attempt in 2020, she found that listening to other people’s life stories helped her feel less alone and make sense of her suffering. “One of the things I’ve learned from my Desert Island Disc friends is that, in life, the hard stuff we go through makes us who we are. I felt that if I could get through the harshness of this challenge, I would be stronger – and I am.”
Today, she wants to share that path to inner strength with others, which is why she encourages everyone to ask themselves the following question: “What will energize you and lead you to an exciting life?” adding, “It all starts with a first step.”
It wasn’t just the reflections of the various destructions that Hepburn healed when she climbed and connected with nature. She found their choices of music – she listened to nearly 30,000 songs – motivating and invigorating, especially when she was outside walking. “Movement is very much associated with music, and the castaways introduced me to so much music that I didn’t know.” As she expanded her musical repertoire, she found herself creating an army of playlists for every aspect of her life. “I’d go out in the morning in the Lake District and I’d put on my ‘morning playlist’ or my ‘rain playlist’ or my ‘bird playlist’.” She also used the playlists to help her exercise control over her emotions. “If I feel sad, I have a playlist to make me happy, or if I want to cry, a playlist that makes me sad. ” She created a playlist for Peter as well, and for those she lost – her late grandmother, her late father – and Molly. The latter includes Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. “If you ask any parent what they do for their children want, they will usually reply that all they want is to be happy,” she explains.
Despite this, when Hepburn finally climbed Everest on May 14, 2022, playing the Miley Cyrus track The Climb in her head, she didn’t feel triumphant, excited or even relieved. “I felt numb,” she says. “It took me six days to get from Base Camp to the top. I was exhausted.”
Her descent then took a deadly turn. In a freak accident, when she was still at 8,000 meters, an empty oxygen bottle catapulted from the sky into her leg and broke her fibula. “It either fell out of someone’s pocket, got loose, or someone threw it off the mountain,” says Hepburn. There was no helicopter rescue at that height, and she was running out of oxygen. “All the renegades who thought about death and chose their death music – Schubert’s Adagio for strings and Mozart’s Requiem were the two top choices – spoke to me at that moment because I was facing death,” says his.
She didn’t know she broke her leg. But no matter what the mountain threw at her, she had faith in her own abilities to come down alive. “I had to get off,” she says. “I wanted to live.”
While she still feels a deep and abiding sense of loss for Molly, she is equally aware that she had once-in-a-lifetime adventures that she would never have sought out if her daughter had been born. And it is not by chance. “If you are faced with a personal tragedy in your life that you cannot change,” she says, “something unexpected and painful, my advice is to see it as an opportunity to do something with your life that you otherwise would not do. did.”
Save me from the Waves: An Adventure From Sea to Summit by Jessica Hepburn (Quarto, £17.99) is available from guardianbookshop.com for 15.83 Euro
